• Outline:
  MS 100 College Algebra proposed draft summer 2005
• Textbook:
  Algebra and Trigonometry, Sixth edition, ©2004, 0618317821. Larson & Hostetler, Houghton Mifflin
• Office hours: TBA
  Instructor: Dana Lee Ling.
  Email: dleeling@comfsm.fm
  Web site: http://www.comfsm.fm/~dleeling/math/math.html
  
• Attendance: Four absences results in withdrawal from the course. A late is one third of an absence. Thus any combination of absences and lates that adds to seven will result in withdrawal. For example, twenty-one lates would result in withdrawal.
• No betelnut in class nor on campus.
• Every Friday there is an evaluative instrument such as a quiz, text, or midterm examination.
• Grading policy:
  Points will be given for homework, quizzes, midterms, and the final.
  Grading is based on the standard college policy: Obtain 90% of the points or more to obtain an A, 80% to 89% for a B, and so forth.
• Academic Honesty Policy: Cheating on an assignment, quiz, test, midterm, or final will result in a score of zero for that assignment, quiz, or examination. Due to our cramped quarters, the course operates by necessity on a system of personal integrity and honor.

Trims

6/15/2005: Recognizing that covering all sections of the first four chapters is nigh on impossible, and my own preference to get into 4.1 asymptotes and the later sections of 4 that cover conics, my own choice will be to leave chapter three in section 3.3 at page 286, keeping only a portion of 3.5.
      I tend to toss as I go to ensure I cover the outline and the material that must be covered to prepare students for MS 101, MS 150, and MS 152. I treaded lightly over mixture problems and skipped page 102 formulas. Simply did not have time. Today I ditched problems of the type example 2 and example 3 on page 131. In my experience in science and other fields, if you have an equation of the form x^n + x^(n-1)... it never FACTORS. But I did teach 132 and 133.
      I did start in 1.1. I think I will hit 4.1 for sure, and I might make 4.2 or even into conics. I pulled (y-h) = (x-k)^2 back into my 1.1 and 1.2 lectures, connecting to the circle formula.
      I allotted 45 minutes for the quiz, four students went past 45 minutes (of 19 students).

6/16/2005: The class remains on schedule with the completion of 1.7 today. I find the ninety-minute period fits well. I usually take 30 to 45 minutes to do the homework from the night before and then cover the new material in the remaining 45 minutes to an hour. I am not teaching in a computer laboratory, I have only required a scientific calculator. I am assigning on the order of six to seven homework problems a night, and I write the problems on the board as not everyone has a textbook. Plus I have students using the fifth and fourth edition. The homework has been in their older edition books, the same homework, just the page and problem number seem to change.
      I do have them graphing, but using two sheets of notebook paper, one turned ninety-degrees underneath the other. Not the same as what LiveMath can do, but they are making out well enough.
      What with the sections mapping so nicely into the 90 minute slot, my mind cannot help but to toy with the concept of an MS 100 taught Tuesday-Thursday outside of the computer laboratory.

6/20/2005: I dropped the absolute value inequalities from 1.7. These take forever to explain, always confuse the heck out of the students, and the knowledge is not a critical path to later mathematics. I opted to toss all of 1.8, polynomial inequalities, which is what put me into 2.1 a day ahead of schedule.

6/21/2005: I covered absolute values, but not absolute value inequalities (1.8). I am not always sure what can be safely skipped, but I tend to look ahead at what algebra and trigonometry are likely to require, at what calculus might demand, at what statistics will expect. So I assigned number 47 on page 182 from 2.1 (looking ahead to statistics) and I covered the difference quotient on page 193 of 2.2 (looking ahead to calculus).
      I know that few to none of my students will go on to trigonometry or calculus. But that is a deeper question I have never been able to answer - why we teach what we teach when study after study shows that a) few remember what they learned in algebra and b) some 95% of the population never needs to know algebra. I try to add in how I use algebra, but even there I am using only linear equations to project times for a run.

2.4: Did not cover stepwise functions

2.5: Dropped. Tremendous algebraic complexity for small useful gain in knowledge.